Chapter 4 Queering Poe: Gender Melancholia in The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym
4.2 Unmournable Loss: Broken Intimacy and Impossible Love
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masculinity, but established his amorphous, unnamable nonsubjectivity. Despite Peters’s initial complicity with the mutineers, later in the novel, he forms a bona fide alliance with Pym and Augustus, who are then held captive by the violent mob on the Grampus. Read alongside the homoerotic undercurrent lurking between Pym,
Augustus, and Peter, the protagonist’s revolt against the Father and the subsequently shared mourning by the fraternal order allegorizes the Freudian scenario of primal parricide, where the fraternity experiences deferred affection for the Father in the form of guilt and remorse.
4.2 Unmournable Loss: Broken Intimacy and Impossible Love
As explicated in Chapter One, the Freudian schema postulates that the fraternal brothers undergo simultaneously admiration and hatred for the Father, who poses a great threat to the fulfillment of their sexual desires. Through parricide, they identify with him and dispense of the hindrance he presented, but such identification is consummated in the form of guilt and remorse. Namely, the murderous group experiences collectively a psychological procedure termed “deferred obedience,”
wherein the fraternity internalizes the prohibition previously enforced by the Father’s actual presence (Totem 166). The taboo against incest here becomes the group of men’s motive to salvage the fraternity order which made them strong. Significantly, Freud argues for the possibility that such an organization “might have been based on homosexual feelings and acts” (167). However, the homosexual cathexis that forms the basis of patriarchal homosociality must be repudiated along with incestuous desires. In this regard, the fraternity is “always already haunted and left by its internalized awareness of the prohibition against the homosexual desires that mobilized it in the first place.” Consequently, the fraternal order can thus be
understood as “a shared male mourning for the father who was the original object of
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desire and who must now be the identification figure” (Greven 128). In Pym, such preemptive loss comes to shape Poe’s representation of American manhood, exemplified by the textual absence of mourning in the narrative.
In particular, Pym’s mockery of his grandfather is later met with a sense of guilt and self-criticism. As he confesses, an “intense hypocrisy” surges while he is
surreptitiously scheming to gratify his “burning expectation” to travel but pretends to be utterly immersed in his studies (2: 66). Such self-criticism is characteristic of the Freudian melancholiac, one that undergoes “an extraordinary diminution on his self-regard, an impoverishment of his ego on a grand scale” manifested in the form of self-reproaches (“Mourning” 246). Hence, Pym’s self-reproach can be seen as the melancholic aftereffect both of the totemic parricide and of the subsequent loss of patronymic ties. Immediately after a narrow escape from a violent gale on the whaling-ship The Penguin, the narrator confesses that:
For the bright side of the painting I had a limited sympathy. My visions were of shipwreck and famine; of death or captivity among barbarian hordes; of a lifetime dragged out in sorrow and tears, upon some gray and desolate rock, in an ocean unapproachable and unknown. Such visions or desires . . . are common, I have since been assured, to the whole
numerous race of the melancholy among men. (65, emphasis mine) As Greven cogently expounds, the preposition “among” here signifies a particular group of men within the larger race of masculinity, whose defining attributes are their disqualified identities which result in estrangement by the larger class of normative manhood (134). A telling piece of evidence is how the very names
“Captain Guy” and “Dirk Peters” imply a satirical image of masculine virility.
Furthermore, the novel’s handy disposal of its male authoritative figures such as Captains Barnard and Guy also reaffirms the fraternity’s defiance against patriarchal
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order. In choosing a path alternative to marital and familial domesticity, Pym’s men are cut off from the privileges assured by patriarchal power. Namely, Poe’s “race of melancholy men” is a “gendered subaltern class” situated within normative manhood;
their “gendered dispossession” provides them an escape route from compulsory masculine self-fashioning but reveals a sense of disconnection immanent in Poe’s homosocial bonding. In other words, Pym’s resolute detachment from his grandfather to join the subaltern same-gender group on a journey attests to the fact that fraternity essentially anticipates a collective male mourning for the original object of desire, namely, the Father. As such, the violent Grampus mutiny can hence be viewed as a combat against the Father for “the female body of a ship” (137) emblematic of the Mother, re-enacting the Freudian primordial parricide. Yet, the men’s mourning for their cut-off bonds with patriarchal order later sinks further and further into the throes of melancholia.
Specifically, albeit surviving a mutiny and a shipwreck, Augustus dies after the deterioration of a severe wound he receives during the reclamation of the Grampus.
The crew is then overwhelmed by “the most gloomy forebodings” that exert such a great influence on their mentality to the extent that they remain completely silent for hours (13: 142). According to the narrator, the despondent men “[sit] motionless by the corpse during the whole day, and never [address] each other except in a whisper”
(142), temporarily paralyzed by emotionless stupor and self-forgetting abandonment.
Curiously, nothing about Augustus is mentioned thereafter, while the remainder of the narration is prevailed by elaborate, pseudoscientific illustrations of fauna and flora.
Here, the focus of the novel shifts from an ambitious expedition that follows the collective male mourning for the Father to an emotionless void marked by
unconscious lethargy and numbness. Such a lapse into silence and torpid state of mind can be seen as manifestation of an interminable lament over the ungrievable loss of
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homosexual cathexis. Their prolonged and indeterminable mourning, albeit never explicitly articulated in words but presents itself on the textual level, thematizes a gender melancholy wherein the Father is both the sign and symptom of the repressed object of desire that has returned to haunt the fraternal order. The physical and emotional unavailability of Poe’s Jacksonian men can therefore be seen as a result of the unattainable social ideal of normative masculinity. However, the melancholy of Pym’s men is tied to at least two facets: their detachment from the patriarchal order and the ungrieved/ungrievable love they have for each other.
Rewriting the conventional Freudian formulation, the fraternal trio in Pym nonetheless dramatizes the “homosexual feelings and acts” that undergird their homosocial/homosexual fraternal bonding. In this respect, Pym’s reiteration of the word “desire” sheds light on the significance of such a fraternal homosexual
attachment in constructing antebellum manhood. Such desire is inextricably tied to his
“burning expectation” to be with a crew of men who not only are “anti-life” but act perversely and erratically with no affective rationalizations. As an illustration, after Augustus’s death, Peters’s emotional bond with Pym immediately ferments into something verging on the brink of male-male intimacy. When the pair discovers the treacherous Tsalalians’ intention to orchestrate an artificial landslide which results in the crew’s destruction, they find themselves trapped on the Island of Tsalal and buried deeply in a gorge. Despite the living inhumation that claims the life of a friend, Pym struggles to drag Peters out, who is buried beneath the rubbish of the collapsed chasm.
After a narrow escape, they imbue each other’s heart with hope while Peters provides a mental shelter for the protagonist with affectionate tenderness, “fights his battles like a big brother; and like a lover, holds him safe and warm when the defeated wanderer seeks his bloody embrace, impotent and whimpering” (Fielder 396).The intensity of their mutual affection reaches zenith when the two survivors find their
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way out of the cleft, during which Pym is suspended merely on a daunting cliff wall.
At this crucial moment, the protagonist reveals a perverse desire to fall into the abyss:
For one moment my fingers clutched convulsively upon their hold, while, with the movement, the faintest possible idea of ultimate escape
wandered, like a shadow, through my mind—in the next my whole soul was pervaded with a longing to fall; a desire, a yearning, a passion utterly uncontrollable. I let go at once my grasp upon the peg, and, turning half round from the precipice, remained tottering for an instant against its naked face. But now there came a spinning of the brain; a shrill-sounding and phantom voice screamed within my ears; a dusky, fiendish, and filmy figure stood immediately beneath me; and, sighing, I sunk down with a bursting heart, and plunged within its arms. (23: 198)
It is, of course, Peters who gently catches him with a firm embrace. Notably, Fiedler observes that here “the language of horror becomes that of eroticism, the dying plunge becomes a climactic embrace,” testifying to the fact that “the longing to fall and the desire for the dark spouse are one, a single perverseness” (396). Such a unity situates the suicidal longing once again back into the orbit of queer melancholia.
As previously mentioned, the melancholiac’s self-beratement is in fact violence toward a loved object, later transferred inward onto the patient’s ego. If we consider the fact that the suicidal melancholiac’s self-destructive impulses as a disguised form of accusations directed at another individual, Pym’s longing to fall might very well represent an aggression toward a lost beloved object. Along this line of reasoning, we can understand Pym’s hypocrisy as initially connected to the inability to love his grandfather, an inhibited desire later transferred to Augustus, whom he cannot name as his object of desire either.
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Butler’s formulation of melancholia is undoubtedly sonorous here: insofar as properly gendered subjectivity mandates the preemptive loss of the primordial loved object and such a loss is founded on the foreclosure of homosexual potentialities, one is always already caught in a cultural predicament wherein homosexual attachments can only be mourned with great difficulty. Predicated on this basis, Pym’s self-critical reflections can be viewed as an aggression aimed at Augustus, an anger that originates from Augustus’s refusal to be saved by him and the impossible love which Augustus awakens in him. In this case, the renounced object is also the object that forsakes and disconnects the lover, presumably because the love between them is one that cannot be acknowledged by culture as reality. Unnamable and ungrievable as such, Pym’s endlessly deferred mourning riffs on the Butlerian melancholia by exemplifying a gender predicament wherein the attachment between subject and object lacks an adequate signifier. Perhaps we can read the protagonist’s melancholy as an expression of a dissatisfaction toward culture’s ills; that is, the genuine object of Pym’s rage might not be Augustus at all, but rather the social milieu they share. Indeed, Pym’s melancholia can be read as a nostalgic yearning for reconciliation between the individual and the patriarchal order, a cultural symptom bound by an unrealized and unrealizable longing that is the lover’s very paralysis.
4.3 Cannibalistic Desire and Homosexuality
The most pronounced allusion to homosexuality in Pym is, however, cannibalism.
Prior to Augustus’s death while Pym’s men desperately wait for deliverance on the now ravaged Grampus, they encounter a Dutch vessel at sea. This vessel, according to the narrator, is a hermaphrodite brig on which three Hollanders can be faintly
identified. Clinging to the last hope, the crew on the Grampus scrutinizes from afar and discovers two seamen lying on the sails while the third, leaning against starboard,
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seems to be observing them attentively. This last man is tall and stout; judging by his gesticulations, the man appears to be “encouraging [them] to have patience, nodding to [them] in a cheerful although rather odd way” (10: 123). Yet upon the brig’s approach, the crew is suddenly overwhelmed by an infernal stench, followed by a vivid sight of dozens of human bodies scattered around in the most gruesome state of putrefaction. The significance of this scene, of course, lies in its satirical effect where the fraternity is rendered powerless and forlorn by a mock-salvational vessel.
However, Poe’s introduction of the hermaphrodite sheds light on the nature of such a nautical encounter as well. Markedly, albeit by definition a hermaphrodite brig is a “sailing vessel that combines the characters of two kinds of craft” (OED), Poe draws the readers’ attention to the fact that both male and female corpses intersperse the boat, creating a biological sense of literal hermaphrodism (Greven 145). In this sense, the hermaphrodite brig can perhaps be interpreted as the nightmarish
heterosexual relations that have haunted Poe’s fraternity, a previously discarded normative order as a hyper-sensationalized return of the repressed. By representing male-female as grotesque spectacle, the presence of the hermaphrodite brig compels the fraternity to “confront disavowed heterosexuality in the form of horrific squalor”
that functions as “a staunch corrective to the attempted creation of a fraternal order without women” (146).
Indeed, Poe’s fraternity is once again disheartened and haunted by the broken promises of heteronormativity. Nonetheless, such a macabre sight does not simply portend oblivion of a gendered subaltern group, but excavates forbidden and deeply buried desires on Pym’s part. Immediately after the discovery of the grotesque motley of cadavers, a transient flash of corporeal, libidinous desire arises and becomes tangible in a thirst for another man’s flesh: Upon the sight of a gull dropping an appalling morsel of “liver-like substance,” Pym discloses, “May God forgive me, but
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now, for the first time, there flashed through my mind a thought, a thought which I will not mention, and I felt myself making a step toward the ensanguined spot. I looked upward, and the eyes of Augustus met my own with a degree of intense and eager meaning which immediately brought me to my senses” (10: 125). The exchange of gazes here is hardly contingent, for it is Augustus, the protagonist’s closest
companion, who returns a reciprocal look which is imbued with “intense and eager meaning.” Pym’s inexpressible longing comes alarmingly close to homoeroticism if we consider the fact that these cut-off men are presented with a meal that cannot be consumed—a carnal desire and atrocious appetite that can never be uttered, fulfilled or satiated, just like homosexual liaisons. Although vociferous claims and reports have been made on numerous cases of nineteenth-century sailors reduced to cannibalism by famine and shipwreck—hence socially acceptable at the time—the hunger in Pym’s gaze embodies a peculiar passion linked to repressed homosexual attraction.
Nevertheless, the interconnection between cannibalism and homosexuality is hardly an innovative one. Specifically, the body has been regarded as a site of stabilized subjectivity; it constitutes a boundary that defines the meaning of the self.
This, however, is not the case with cannibalistic acts in practice. In cannibalism, what is alien and extraneous to the self becomes physically united and identified with it.
While such an act presupposes an absolute dualism that divides inside from outside as well as a coherent structure of one’s own body, it paradoxically dissolves the structure it purports to hold. The idea of incorporation implies an unsettling force that
subsumes what is alien to the ego until there remains no category of exteriority left to threaten the inner stability. Paradoxically, by devouring another man, one violates the boundary that stabilizes identities; cannibalism thus provides an “ecstatic union” by
“reliev[ing] the self of the burden of selfhood”—an ultimate opportunity to “consume
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or be consumed by another” (Crain 34). Similarly, incorporation oftentimes represents sexual intercourse: it is not uncommon for people to refer to sexual behaviors as a form of eating. For instance, an undeniable fact is that in French, to consume and consummate are the same word, while the Germans have a saying of “eating anybody through love.” On a metaphoric level, the phrase “you are what you eat” pertinently casts doubt on our basic perceptions of personal identity grounded on total unity and oneness. In these respects, cannibalism is overpoweringly erotic and self-shattering.
Such an erotic dimension is taken further to form a linkage between cannibalism and taboo sex. For instance, in his reading of Herman Melville’s Typee, Caleb Crain explores the parallels between cannibalism and homosexuality. To begin with, the idea of cannibalism elicits an emotional double bind, one that occasions “delicious
shudders” (33) constituted by the concurrence of horror and enthrallment, repulsion and fascination.
Such a highly ambivalent affect is closely tied to the delightful horror of Poe’s conception of perverseness, while in Pym it takes the shape of bodily transgression fulfilled by cannibalism, the ultimate symbiotic union of Freud’s oral phase. Here cannibalism is typified both by bodily intimacy between statuesque nude men
undressing for one another, Pym’s incipient voluptuous desire for male body, and the literal representation of cannibalism. Specifically, the act of cannibalism is literalized in a scene where Pym eats his fellow-traveler Richard Parker, even though such a deed is allegedly performed out of self-preservation. The hero, previously enthralled by something revolting, is propelled by an irresistible thirst and eventually loses control of his own actions. The abovementioned formula is ubiquitous in many Gothic novels and even more thematically related, in Melville’ maritime novel, where
cannibalism frequently functions as a coded reference to homosexuality and the very idea of incorporation that threatens self-annihilation. More aptly put, cannibalism and
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homosexuality both violate the divisions between identity and desire to the extent that it prefigures the disintegration of the self.
By extension, though few accounts are made to elaborate the role of Parker in the fraternal group or his relation to Pym, he can perhaps be seen as a surrogate for
Augustus, the original abandoned object which facilitates Pym’s melancholic incorporation, one that is saturated with both love and aggression. To borrow the Butlerian lexicon, if melancholic identification serves as a precondition for giving up on the object, the incorporation of the attachment becomes the act of identification per se, thereby granting the melancholiac an opportunity to preserve the object as part of the ego itself. Namely, if the internalization of loss is integral to the mechanism of its refusal, letting the object go would paradoxically mean averting the loss as a complete loss. Furthermore, there will be no utter abandonment of the object, only a shift of the object from externally to internal. In brief, relinquishing the object entails a
melancholic incorporation. Read in tandem with the social and cultural prescription imposed by antebellum heterosexual manhood, Augustus’s body is thus emblematic of the barred object which demands preemptive repudiation for Pym. Through the
incorporation of Augustus’s surrogate, the homosexual object-cathexis is then replaced by an identification under which the ego becomes “the sedimentation of those objects loved and lost, the archaeological remainder, as it were, of unresolved grief” (Psychic 167). In a period wherein love between men was an untouchable subject, the phraseology of cannibalism dilutes the shame that pertains to deviant sexualities, while granting accesses to a more permissible analog of violation of the male body.
In essence, Pym can be viewed as Poe’s appropriation of the Freudian scenario, one that highlights the melancholiac’s ambivalent feelings toward the object of desire.
In essence, Pym can be viewed as Poe’s appropriation of the Freudian scenario, one that highlights the melancholiac’s ambivalent feelings toward the object of desire.